With the advents of computer-implemented data capturing and processing and mass data storage, the amount of information generated by mankind has risen dramatically and with an ever quickening pace. As a result there is a continuing and growing need to collect and store, identify, track, classify and to assimilate, transform and re-define this growing sea of information for heightened use by humans. As a result, there are many systems that aggregate information from a variety of sources and attempt to categorize and organize this information. Some of these systems even endeavor to predict the outcome of events based on algorithms, formulae, or pattern matching. These systems fail to accurately determine the outcome or predict the outcome of a legal case based on information gathered from a docketing system. A case or legal case is an action, cause, suit, or controversy at law or in equity, a question contested before a court of justice, or an aggregate of facts which furnishes occasion for the exercise of the jurisdiction of a court of justice. Black's Law Dictionary 215 (Joseph R. Nolan ed., 6th ed., West 1990).
In many areas and industries, including the financial and legal sectors and areas of technology, for example, there are content and enhanced experience providers, such as The Thomson Reuters Corporation. Such providers identify, collect, analyze and process key data for use in generating content for consumption by professionals and others involved in the respective industries. Providers in the various sectors and industries continually look for products and services to provide subscribers, clients and other customers and for ways to distinguish their firm's offerings over the competition. Such providers constantly strive to create and provide enhanced tools, including search tools, to enable clients to more efficiently and effectively process information and make informed decisions.
There are known services providing preprocessing of data, entity extraction, entity linking, indexing of data, and for indexing ontologies that may be used in delivery of peer identification services. For example U.S. Pat. No. 7,333,966, entitled “SYSTEMS, METHODS, AND SOFTWARE FOR HYPERLINKING NAMES”, U.S. Pat. Pub. 2009/0198678, entitled “SYSTEMS, METHODS, AND SOFTWARE FOR ENTITY RELATIONSHIP RESOLUTION”, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/553,013, entitled “SYSTEMS, METHODS, AND SOFTWARE FOR QUESTION-BASED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS AND SUMMARIZATION”, U.S. Pat. Pub. 2009/0327115, entitled “FINANCIAL EVENT AND RELATIONSHIP EXTRACTION”, and U.S. Pat. Pub. 2009/0222395, entitled “ENTITY, EVENT, AND RELATIONSHIP EXTRACTION”, the contents of each of which are incorporated herein by reference herein in their entirety, describe systems, methods and software for the preprocessing of data, entity extraction, entity linking, indexing of data, and for indexing ontologies in addition to linguistic and other techniques for mining or extracting information from documents and sources. Systems and methods also exist for identifying and ranking documents including U.S. Pat. Publ. 2011/0191310 (Liao et al.) entitled “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR RANKING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DOCUMENTS USING CLAIM ANALYSIS”, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. Additionally, systems and methods exist for identifying entity peers including U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/926,591, (Olof-Ors et al.) entitled “DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS INTERFACE AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE”, filed Oct. 29, 2015, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Existing technology may use a form of outcome detection technology, but is very much restricted to one practice area (e.g., IP) and requires considerable manual oversight. Current solutions provide probabilities or “predictions” solely based on the prior information (e.g. Judge John Smith settled in 3% of all prior cases). What is needed is an outcome detection and prediction engine that can determine or predict the outcome of a case as to a specific entity involved in the case.